About
I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan, with a focus in Political Theory. I completed my Masters at the University of Chicago in 2014 and earned a Certificate in African Studies from UM in 2019. My research and teaching focus on critical theory, comparative political theory, and African politics and political thought. My work has appeared in Political Theory.
My dissertation develops a critical theory of political temporality inspired by anti-colonial African political struggles. I begin from the premise that contemporary political institutions, practices, and imaginaries rely upon a colonial-capitalist understanding of time that dominant political theoretical debates tend to ignore or implicitly accept, limiting their critical potential. Alternatively, I draw from the African anti-colonial archive to demonstrate how temporality should not be treated as a natural or apolitical backdrop for politics but instead as a site of struggle in itself. The thinkers who I discuss—including, among others, Wole Soyinka, Julius Nyerere, and Frantz Fanon—undertake temporally-focused political projects that rewrite narratives about the movement of history and relationships across generations, establish competing rhythms of life, and unsettle key temporally-situated categories that classify contemporary identities. I reconstruct their political projects with a particular focus on the “temporalities of struggle” they articulate; and I demonstrate how their work inspires forceful reinterpretations of key political theoretical concepts like nature, self-determination, democracy, legitimation, founding, and historical justice.
Field of Study:
- Political Theory
- African Studies
